Employees

Premier Farnell is a high service business, driving a high performance culture. With 99.6% of all orders delivered the same or next day, consistent high performance and service excellence is essential.

For two consecutive years Premier Farnell has conducted an all-employee survey, Your Voice, in order to evaluate employee engagement and give all employees an opportunity to share insight into what it is like to work for Premier Farnell and where we can improve. Based on the feedback received, there are four areas where employees told us we could do better – Leadership Development, Personal Development, Innovation and Customer Focus.

Leadership development and succession planning are critical for consistent and ongoing high performance. Premier Farnell has a well embedded process to meet with business leaders every six months in order to review what we are doing and ensure that appropriate succession plans and bench strength are in place. Additionally, these reviews are supplemented by regular meetings throughout the year attended by the CEO, CFO, COO and Global HR Director to review talent throughout the Group and ensure that people plans are appropriately aligned to the strengths and weaknesses of our current and future leaders.

In order to further strengthen our leaders we have begun a programme of 360 degree feedback, where select employees from every level in the Group are asked to comment on the performance of their leader. 360 degree feedback allows employees to give real feedback to their managers and gives managers a better sense of their performance and more importantly how it impacts employees. We also have a well embedded mentor programme that informally matches senior business leaders with talented performers in order to help them navigate the organisation and nurture their potential growth. This programme has been so successful that we now have plans in place to extend it deeper into the organisation as part of our commitment to personal development of all employees.

Attracting talented people and retaining the talent we have in the Group is of the utmost importance for continued success. Our commitment to personal development is unwavering. All employees meet with their managers at least every six months to review performance and talk about career aspirations, which are included in an aspirational development plan. Employees are then encouraged to take one hour a week for personal development. This time is used in a variety of ways including attending sales training in order to become a more effective seller, job shadowing a role related to aspirational development or studying modules in our Online Learning Centre. Capability ladders have also been created for certain functions; these ladders are used by employees in order to understand what they need and how they can target their own personal development for career progression. These ladders have been so popular that they will be expanded for additional functions.

eLife, a Group initiative, was created in order to encourage employees to embrace the web and improve innovation. Through eLife we have introduced an online performance management and objective setting tool that gives employees and managers access to their performance reviews and objectives year round. We have also worked to further embed the idea of innovation in the business this year with the development of an innovation exchange. The innovation exchange is a cross-functional, global forum in which participation changes every quarter. The exchange participants evaluate suggestions submitted from around the business and where relevant begin the process of developing the innovation. We have also created innovation teams that unite talented performers into cross-functional, global groups with a focus on projects that sit outside of their daily scope and stretch their capabilities.

One such innovation team is driving improved customer focus across the business. This is the final area where employees told us we needed to get better and this team of talented performers are ensuring that customers are at the heart of everything we do. Every employee across the business has an objective related to customers and throughout the year, each employee will interact with at least one customer, further embedding our customer commitment and high service culture. This initiative will be extended to the Board of Directors who have committed to spending time in one of our distribution facilities picking a perfect order for one of our customers during the year.